It's gonna be a cold, lonely summer

I had dinner with my girlfriends last night. One of them is moving to Chicago; another is spending the remainder of the summer in Illinois. My best friend already lives a few hours away, and my sister is moving to Boston. Those of us left behind are going to have to rally together.

I'll tell you what's likely to happen. I'll end up spending too much money shopping, that's what I'll do. Maybe I'll single-handedly revive the economy! In fact, it's already started. I've been looking for an affordable salt mill and pepper mill set-- not a pepper mill and salt shaker. Mills. Both. I finally found these:


I've been searching for years.

The only other homefront news I think I have is that we have a tomato growing. I was starting to think the 2 liter bottle thing was a failure...and I still think it mostly is. We should have bought patio varieties and/or planted them in 5 gallon buckets and hung them from the carport. We'll try that next year.

In the meantime:


Now, if we can just keep the slugs off the strawberries, we'll be golden. We've had a constant stream of blossoms on the strawberry plants, but the slugs and snails just keep eating them! Since I sprayed the aphids away, I haven't seen them come back; however, the slugs are more than picking up the slack. So I'm gonna research some organic repellent. Since we tend to want to eat our own crops with just a rinse of water, I'd prefer to not spray chemicals if I can help it. Any tried and true solutions are welcome!

Done and done.

Ha! If only...

Actually, we are spending this weekend at our rental house packing. We haven't done nearly enough of that and there's 10 years of accumulation (including grime that needs to be taught a lesson) which means we have our work cut out for us.

So no work on the house this weekend, but we have made some decisions. Lights for the bathroom have been ordered:I got them from Target Online, and they cost more than I wanted to spend. But I think they're really the best we've seen so far. I'll also still get my waffle-weave shower curtain, in a hotel crisp white, and we're going to go for a burgundy rug. Target had some lovely ones on clearance a week or two ago, so I'll go see if they're still there. And NO FUZZY THING on the toilet. I'm breaking with tradition, blazing a new path. It's a banner day. I think Adam will be pleased at this decision.

Then for our towel bar to be mounted under the wall cabinet, we like this:
Adam lusted after it, then I managed to find it at the Moen ONLINE OUTLET STORE!!! for $29 (originally $47 or something), and that is the cheapest I've seen it. Who knew nice towel rods were so pricey? I will be checking the stores one more time for a cheaper knock-off before committing.

Drawer and cabinet pulls were bought a while ago, but I'm waiting to slap a fresh coat of paint on the cabinets first:
We may have ended up buying these in brushed nickel (can't remember), but they'll be behind the door, so I'm less concerned with their consistency in the shiny chrome business.

I'd also like to have a nice new shower rod that isn't a tension rod-- if the tension kind aren't in there perfectly, then the first time you pull your towel off, you end up in the tub unconscious and wrapped in your shower curtain. Or so I've heard; no personal experience to back that up...Anyway, I have to admit, the one that was in there was in pretty good, even if it was a tension rod. I started to paint around it, and then caught myself-- "Stupid you! Take that thing down and paint the whole wall!!" That's what I did. And I found a little circle of this wallpaper underneath. Clearly, this thing hadn't been off the wall in many, many years. At any rate, Lowe's had some chrome rods that attach to the wall on clearance for $5, but I'm not sure I want to screw into the window trim, which I think I would have to do. More investigation is necessary.

But we're coming together.

An amazing find!

Or so I thought.

We realized this weekend that neither of us had been up in the loft of our garage yet. There's no ladder or stairs, and there really hasn't been too much urgency to get up there. But I saw the corner of an old-fashioned storm window, so I dragged our short ladder to at least get my head beyond the loft floor.

And I saw this:

How exciting! It looks like it's filled with books!! Since our immediate previous owners were the government, there's not been much left of the real people who lived in the house. This was the first interesting sign of life that we'd seen. But I had to take these pictures holding my arm up and aiming the camera blindly and we didn't really have time to mess with it, so I decided to save it for another time.

An hour or so later, I returned from one of our many trips to the store, and Adam told me he had climbed up and pulled the box down-- it was a set of encyclopedias. Copyright from the 1920s. Useless, but interesting, nonetheless. I ran out to the garage to have a look at our booty, and what I saw looked strangely familiar:

Yep. In his haste, he missed the L in the Roman numeral copyright date. They were the exact same set of 1979 Funk & Wagnall's encyclopedias that my family started collecting not long after I was born. You could get them at the Safeway (we lived across the street from it) with green stamps, or the equivalent, and they sold yearly updates. We got a set of dishes for my first college apartment the same way.

So, although they are 30 years old (yikes!) and might otherwise be interesting for nostalgia, they're the same exact damn books I looked at and did my school reports from before the invasion of the shiny new internets. Not even different encyclopedias.

What are the odds.

*Actually, the odds are pretty good-- that Safeway was only about 6 or 8 blocks from this house. Come to think of it, I sure moved around a lot to end up pretty close to where I started. I'm not too sure what to think of that.

We're that much closer...

As I mentioned, lots of little accomplishments this weekend, and a few really big ones.

For one thing, my $70 shower head purchased for $12 was installed:


7 different settings! It's so exciting.

We also put our first housewarming present together. Our realtor gave this to us on the day we closed, but we were afraid we'd ruin it, so we hadn't put it together until now:


This location, beside the pantry, will likely be its long term home, hopefully to house an espresso machine. Eventually. Until then, we're going to use it as an island to try out how we like the size and arrangement before we build a permanent island.

The kiddo got some raking and bagging done...I did a little sunlight scouting in the backyard so we can choose a place for a vegetable garden. And I spied a robin-- I don't care what some groundhog in Penn says; a robin and some 65 degree weather says spring. Period.

Now for the big stuff.

Ta-da!!!
Da-dum!
Woohoo!


And hallelujah. It's about time.


Ok. So full disclosure. Not everything is entirely hooked up. Sink and faucet are in-- it was a many, many hours long fiasco, though we finally got it done. I put a bead of caulk around the edge and I'll deal with shaping it up using my fingernail, a caulk scraper, a razor and some solvent. We cut one little piece of PVC too short, so we'll have to redo that one length. But the garbage disposal is otherwise together. Fridge is in and connected to the icemaker line. Dishwasher is hooked up, though not screwed in yet. And the stove is just sitting there, attached to nothing.

We may have a slight placement issue with the stove and dishwasher. We measured many times, but eh. We still got it wrong. We have a few ideas and solutions up our sleeves and we'll deal with it later.

But it's shaping up!!

Oh yeah! And Adam did most of the gruntwork here, and the kiddo was a huge help on the yard and island. I just pointed out when someone was doing something wrong.

All the crap that just won't go away.

Ok. It's more like all the crap I can't bring myself to get rid of. Like this little gem from the 80s:

Fond memories of frizzy hair, big bangs, and pictures at the JC Penny Portrait Studio... And then there's the reminders of what could've been...


Mom did a little cleaning the other day and came across the wallpaper border I had picked out for my room when I was 10. It never made its way to the wall. I took it home with me. Maybe I'll stick it in the box of ReStore items. Some little girl getting in touch with her floral side for the first time should have this. I lost contact with the Laura Ashley in me long ago. Honestly, I kind of hope she lost my number.

So as you see, we are finally in the throes of packing for real. Notice has been given. Boxes have been salvaged from my office move. And frankly, boxes are like the best thing ever for a certain sector of the family population:


And I had one more picture of The Senator (the tabby in the back) loving on the box, and one of Chester (tabby in front) curled up inside the box on all my toiletries, and one of the little tuxedo Birdie (aka Holstein Kitty) posing with our old school bookcases, but my stupid computer crashed and erased everything on my memory card.

Anyway, that brings to me to the one thing I wish I could get rid of. The "bookcases"; the good old cinder block and plank bookcases. Adam refused to give them up almost 5 years ago when I moved in. He got rid of almost every other piece of furniture in the house, but he couldn't let go of the cinder blocks. And, in all fairness, they are functional and handy, and they aren't in our public spaces. For a while, we tried negotiations: he'd get rid of his bookcases, if he could, in turn, burn my wicker/reed bookcase in the yard. But the negotiations broke down and we called it a draw. I don't know what their place will be in the new house, but I see that they are definitely coming with us.

His sister managed to spruce hers up with fabric on the cinder blocks. Maybe I'll try that along with staining the wood. Would that be wrong?

Perhaps...

Have I found a suitable lighting compromise?

Polling people through my previous photoshop efforts, led me to the conclusion that perhaps the top set of lights was too old-fashioned, but the bottom set was way too tall-- I even had to lower them in the photo so they fit on screen, and they still looked too tall. However, I think all liked the vertical lines. I'm still back and forth.

But maybe these are a sort of compromise:Sorry-- I didn't even begin to have the patience to get the perspective right on that cabinet. And we'll hang a towel bar from the bottom of it...That's the plan, anyway.

Bought this light...

...for the office. $25 and not too nipply. Can't really complain.

My biggest deal yet and other tales of the Home Depot

So I've mentioned the bathroom wall cabinet at 30% off...the Moen shower head at 80% off...the stainless steel trashcan duo for $10...our labor day sale granite tile and appliances...our Overstock.com faucet...the chandelier on clearance...We've found some pretty good deals. Well, folks, my bestest bargain so far came along over the weekend.

I almost never shop at Home Depot-- they're a little too expensive for poor little me. But they happen to be the only people we've found that carry our base shoe in the lengths we need. So we trucked on out there Saturday night to stock up on base shoe and grab a few other odds and ends we needed for our tiling project (which will get its own very special post, ugh.) and happened upon...



That's 92 square feet of Rajah slate bought at the reasonable price of $0.49/ft2. And it doesn't stop there. Remember I got a little tip that Lowes would be putting a lot of stock on 50% off clearance? After we got that information, we decided to put the search for laundry room flooring on hold for a while, at least until we had a chance to view the upcoming bargains. But when I saw this big stack of tile, I counted it and found that there was much more than the 77 ft2 that I need. I am NOT an impulse shopper, so I had to "sleep on it." Except that sleeping on it meant that before we even got to the car I decided I'd come back the next morning. So I did. And the flooring guy who loaded it up for me said that there 90 tiles, plus 2 broken ones (there were a few more broken tiles than that, but I can use them for edges if I have to) so he only charged me for 84 tiles. I can't even get nice ceramic tiles for that, and I certainly can't get half decent sticky tile at that price. It'll be more work, but I'm so happy.

Now, on the not so nice side of our trip to the depot...We needed about 20 lengths of base shoe. We see the station with a big sign that says, "CUT IT YOURSELF," in all caps, just like that. We think, "Great, we don't have to find someone to do this for us." Well, let me say that the sign should read, "Cut it your DAMN self." It is a tiny ass little hand saw. That kind of ridiculousness gets old after 5 boards, much less 20.

But the slate made it all ok. And the tiling guy was actually very helpful and seemed knowledgeable-ish. Overall, a good shopping weekend. The actual tiling project, however, is another story entirely.